CRYSTAL COOL song-WATER

The poet-song-writer is a hunter consciously and aggressively active in the hunting process of composition, of the recording of history, a sort of archeology in words. The poetry and the song is what

while always feeling underqualified to comment on outright poetry (despite the lit degree!), i like a lot of the images i'm seeing in here.

a personal fave would be "slender hands touched his tragedy and sorrow like torn wings, memory

Even though I write a great deal of poetry I find it as difficult as you do to evaluate it. I include the folowing prose-poem in response to your honesty--and I thank you.-Ron

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DEADLY POISON

...Poetry of the kind that has been discovered by a growing number of modern writers, the poetry of self which surpasses fiction and revolutionizes it....you do not so much perceive relationships as experience them....I am eternally grateful for being forced by circumstances to be a poet...without that method of escape from self I would never have known that there was another world...my respect for the act of creativity grew. It's not the same as escape into music. Like each art form poetry has its own ambience and meaning, purpose and idiosyncrasies.-Karl Shapiro, To Abolish Children and Other Essays, Quadrangle Books, Chicago, 1968, p.237, p.267 and p.271.

Poetry should be zany. Not only should it frolic, as Camus says, it should cavort, stumble, trip, fall flat on its face, get up, slither, fly, soar, dazzle, gloom, lash out and all those other things we do in life. -With thanks to Karl Shapiro, To Abolish Children and Other Essays, Quadrangle Books, Chicago, 1968, p.79.

That fatal tendency to sulk and melancholy,

pomposity, dreariness in these and past days

of often indestinguishable poetry and prose,

in which the world is in flight from values,

fight over values and nearly anarchic chaos

and anyone, artist, public person,

gets evaluated by the pawnbroker

as near-saint, failed saint, Shylock,

minor or major: the curator